RAS-KB: The Blog

Kang Mincheol was a captain of North Korean special forces. His military service number was 9970. He was one of the three terrorists sent by North Korea to Burma in 1983 to kill the South Korean President, Chun Do-hwan, while the latter was on a state visit there. The group of three terrorists successfully detonated the bombs they had hidden on the roof of Aungsan Mausoleum killing most of the South Korean delegates gathered there to pay reverence at the place. They missed, however, their main target the President who survived through a chain of lucky accidents. After the attack the terrorists were left on their own to escape from the country. North Korea did not only had no preparations to help them out of the country but also washed their hands completely off the whole incident, insisting that they had nothing to do with it. In encounters with the Burmese security forces, one was killed and the other two Kang and a major were seriously wounded and captured. Kang had sustained grave wounds throughout his body. Both were sentenced to death. But Kang was given a reprieve and put in the Insein prison where he died in May, 2008 after surviving 25 years on two meals a day. Hardly anybody in Korea, neither in the South nor in the North, paid any attention to his death.

Ambassador Ra Jong-yil is currently a University Distinguished Professor at Hanyang University, Seoul. After studying Political Science at Seoul National University he received a PhD in International Relations from the University of Cambridge (UK). He then became a professor of Political Science and Diplomacy at Kyunghee University, Seoul, where he held various senior administrative posts. In the course of his distinguished career, he has held many important positions. In 1996 he was appointed Special Aide to Kim Dae-jung on Diplomacy and Security. In 1998-9 he served as First & Second Director, National Intelligence Service. From 2001-3 he was Korean Ambassador to the United Kingdom. 2003-4 he was Senior Advisor to the President for National Security. From 2004-7 he served as Ambassador to Japan. From 2007 until 2011 he was President of the Woosuk University. he is currently the Chairman of the Special Committee on Human Rights in North Korea, National Commission for Human Rights, and a member of the Presidential Committee of Preparation for Unification. He has authored many books and innumerable articles.

This lecture will look at possible ways in which the Chinese narrative tradition affected the development of p’ansori. This will involve investigating trade between Korea and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, as well as examining Chinese stories, actors and singers appearing in p’ansori texts and literature. The similar characters and differences of style between p’ansori and certain Chinese narrative songs, such as the drum song or “drum singing” (dagu 大鼓) performed in the north and northeast of China in areas such as Heibei, Beijing, and Tianjing and the popular storytelling tradition in Yangzhou (Yangzhou xianci 弦詞) on the East Coast of China, will also be considered.

Yeonok Jang holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She has taught courses on Korean music, Korean culture, world music culture, and Korean music performance at a variety of universities in Korea and the United Kingdom. She currently teaches at Yonsei University. She is the author of Korean P’ansori Singing Tradition: Development, Authenticity, and Performance History (2014, Scarecrow Press).

How is it that a Chinese tofu salesman, who lived his entire life in the Middle Kingdom about 1800 years ago and never set foot on the Korean Peninsula, came to be venerated in Korea as a god of both war and wealth? Join us as we trace back the story of Guan Yu, and discover how this semi-mythical figure, described in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms as over 9 foot tall, with a 2-foot long beard, a face as red as a jujube, and eyes like those of a phoenix, first appeared in Korea during the Japanese Hideyoshi invasions of the late 16th century. In a few short years, several shrines were built in honor of Guan Yu, the bean-curd-seller-cum-general. In the last years of the Joseon Dynasty, King Gojong and his second wife had more shrines built in Seoul, giving the Guan Yu cult more impetus. Why was this?
Guan Yu's shrines have been all but forgotten by modern Korea, and yet in some places ceremonies are still held. Where are they carried out, and by whom? Dongmyo is the largest Guan Yu shrine remaining, and the only one in Seoul that still sits in its original location. Some interesting discoveries have been made during recent restoration, but that restoration is also not without controversy.

Jacco Zwetsloot has lived in Korea for 14 of the last 18 years. He has held a number of jobs in this country, and calls himself a Jacco-of-all-trades. Currently Jacco is studying for a Master's degree in Korean Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has previously spoken to the RAS on Hollywood movies set and filmed in Korea, North Korean comic books, and Japanese-run POW camps in Korea during World War Two.

Even though postage stamps may be going the way of typewriters and pagers, North and South Korea continue to produce millions of colorful and stamps each year, providing a window into how the two governments see themselves and the world around them. After exploring the Joseon Dynasty's development of a postal service 120 years ago, Beck will turn to the philatelic rivalry that emerged between the two Koreas soon after division in 1945. He will then trace the development of stamps in the North and the South over the past seven decades and share with the audience some of his most interesting philatelic finds over the past three decades. Beck is currently the president of the U.S.-based Korea Stamp Society (www.pennfamily.org/KSS-USA/).

Peter Beck joined The Asia Foundation as Country Representative in Korea in January, 2012. He is a seasoned Korea specialist and former Asia Foundation Haas intern. Prior to joining the Foundation, Beck was the Council on Foreign Relations Hitachi Fellow at Keio University in Tokyo, and the Pantech Research Fellow at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Northeast Asia Director for the International Crisis Group in Seoul (2004-2007) and Director of Research at the Korea Economic Institute in Washington, DC (1997-2004). He has also served as a member of the Ministry of Unification's Policy Advisory Committee (2005 – 2007).

Peter Beck received his bachelor's degree in Asian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and conducted his graduate studies in Comparative Public Policy and International Relations at the University of California at San Diego's Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. Beck studied Korean at Seoul National University, Yonsei University, and Hanguk University of Foreign Studies.

Join the RAS for an evening of music on November 14th at 7:30 PM. Tickets are 10,000KRW each and can be reserved by submitting the reservation form. See the accompanying flyer or contact royalasiatickorea@gmail.com for more information. We hope to see you there!

Two countries far apart, the Czech Republic and the Republic of Korea, share a long history of more than 140 years of interactions. From the times the very first Czechs entered the Korean territory as part of attacking US forces in 1871, the relations between the two nations and countries have been of the highest importance. As the Republic of Korea is now the third largest Czech trade partner outside of Europe (after China and the US, and before Japan), and Korean companies invested almost 2 billion USD in the Czech Republic, 150,000 Korean tourists visited Prague in 2013 and not less than 8 weekly non-stop direct flights connect the main airports of both countries, the cooperation between the two countries is increasing year by year.

But there is also a rich historical past in Czech-Korean relations. The presentation will cover the whole history of the interactions, from the early visits by the Czechs to Korea, to the cooperation between soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion with Korean independence fighters between 1918-1920, and the creation of Czech Korean studies which started as early as 1943. After the communist coup in 1948, Czechoslovakia became a close ally of North Korea in the 1950s, and the presentation will thus follow the most interesting moments of the cooperation between the two countries. The presentation will then cover the development of knowledge of the Czech Republic in Korea since the 1970s and – indeed – the development of Czech-Korean relations in the last quarter of a century, when the newly democratic Czech Republic established fully-fledged relations with the Republic of Korea, while keeping its Embassy in Pyongyang.

Jaroslav Olša, jr (1964) is the outgoing Ambassador of the Czech Republic to the Republic of Korea (since 2008) and author of a series of articles covering a wide range of Czech-Korean relations published in Czech, English and Korean. He earned his MA degree in Asian and African Studies at Charles University, Prague, but studied also in Tunis and Amsterdam. He has published books on African modern art and history and – most recently – edited and authored „1901 photographs of Seoul by Enrique Stanko Vráz and other early Czech travellers´ views of Korea“ (Seoul Museum of History, 2011), „Czech-Korean film encounters“ (Korean Film Archive, 2013) and „The Korean Peninsula after the artistice as seen by Czechoslovak delegates to the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission 1953-1956“ (Seoul Museum of History, 2013). His most recent Czech-language book – prepared together with leading Czech Koreanist Miriam Lowensteinová – covers the life and work of early Korean archaeologist, historian and translator of Korean literature of the 1940s, Han Heung-su. Some of Olša´s articles are available at the Czech Embassy´s website www.mzv.cz/seoul.

While North Korea is usually described in media as a 'Stalinist country', this long has become a misleading description. From the mid-1990s the private sector plays an important, or even dominant role in the North Korean economy. While most of the North Korean businesspeople operate on small level, some entrepreneurs have amassed significant capital, and operate rather large companies. In most cases the North Korean large companies are registered as owned by the state, with the 'foreign exchange earning operations' being the most common cover for such activities. The lecture will discuss how captains of North Korean big business work and live, what is their relations with the state and their possible future.

Andrei Lankov was born in Russia in 1963, he studied in Leningrad State University and Kim Il Sung University in North Korea. His major research interest is North Korean social and political history; he has published five books and a number of articles on this topic. He now teaches at Kookmin University, Seoul.